In the light of the growing divergence between projection and observation, a direct comparison between the IPCC’s now-reduced near-term global warming projections and observed temperature change since 2005 is of value as a performance indicator for the models’ global-warming projections.

Fig. 8 shows such a comparison, based on the downgraded projections in IPCC (2013, fig. 11.25a: see Fig. 2 above). In the nine years since 2005, a divergence of 0.15 Cº has occurred.

Multiple lines of evidence now confirm that the models and consequently the IPCC have overestimated global warming. Yet neither that misconceived organization nor any of its host of unthinking devotees has displayed any remorse. Instead, they persist in maintaining that the warming is temporarily paused, though they cannot really explain why; or they blame particulate aerosols, their get-out-of-jail-free fudge-factor; or they pretend warming is really continuing unabated, saying it has gone into hiding deep in the oceans where, conveniently, we cannot measure it, or that the Earth-atmosphere system has a fever driven by four atom-bombs’-worth of heat content increase every second.

What they are not prepared to countenance, notwithstanding the real-world, measured evidence, is the growing probability that they and their precious models have so badly misunderstood the climate, or so well understood it and so badly misrepresented it, that global warming is simply not going to occur at anything like any of the exaggerated rates that they had until now so confidently over-predicted.

Do not underestimate the importance of the IPCC’s climbdown, albeit that it is furtive and that there is not a hint of it in the Summary for Policymakers – the only part of the latest assessment that lazy politicians and incurious journalists may ever get around to reading.

A group of climate change scientists were rescued by helicopter Jan. 2, after being stranded in the ice since Christmas morning. But the majority of the broadcast networks’ reports about the ice-locked climate researchers never mentioned climate change.

The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition.

In fact, rather than point out the mission was to find evidence of climate change, the networks often referred to the stranded people as “passengers,” “trackers” and even “tourists,” without a word about climate change or global warming.

Chris Turney, the expedition’s leader, is a professor of climate change at the University of South Wales. According to Turney’s personal website, the purpose of the expedition is to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.”

ALAMEDA – The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star is responding to a Jan. 3rd request from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) to assist the Russian-Flagged Akademik Shokalskiy and Chinese-Flagged Xue Long that are reportedly ice-bound in the Antarctic. The Russian and Chinese Governments have also requested assistance from the United States.

Coast Guard Pacific Area Command Center received the request Thursday evening from AMSA after they evaluated the situation and determined there is sufficient concern that the vessels may not be able to free themselves from the ice. AMSA has been coordinating rescue operations since the Akademik Shokalskiy became beset with ice on Dec. 24. The Polar Star will cut short its planned stop in Sydney to support the AMSA’s request for assistance.

(Chris) Turney (a climate scientician at Australia's University of New South Wales) explained that "climate change may have prompted the iceberg to shatter and float into the previously open sea where the mostly Australian team finds itself stranded."

Yeah, right: An iceberg corralled the vessel, and then froze the open sea for miles around it into an impenetrable, contiguous, solid mass of ice so thick that icebreakers couldn't reach the ship...because of global warming.

An Antarctic expedition intended to demonstrate global warming in the Antarctic became icebound in mid summer, and has caused other ice breakers to require rescue. At last count 22 crew members will remain trapped in the ice and wait for conditions to improve. The climate models had predicted open water in summer, but that didn’t work. Predicting just when the ice conditions will get better is a bit difficult since Winterset here is High Summer down there.

Of course the great faith in the consensus on global warming – oops, climate change – has not changed. It is too warming! And all that ice in the Eastern US, and all that ice trapping the scientists, is weather, not climate, and we know we don’t know how to predict the weather. And we can explain what looks like anomalies in our predictions. Let us make a few adjustments in our billion dollar models, and all well be well.

Now this endless and completely pointless Drivel and rehashing of biased reports has gone 100 Pages, can it be canned?

No one is going to be swayed to the other side in this argument and the "facts" whatever they are are so buried in Political, scientific and financial bias, no one in the street is ever going to know the real truth for at least another 50-100 years.

This endless arguing is just making people look stupid and surely it's gone on long enough now. If there is no clear consensus after all this time and more than 1000 posts on the subject, Time to wake up and realise that the debate is about as creditable as 2 fleas arguing over who owns the great dane they are on.

Clearly many people have far too much time on their hands if they can go trolling endless news reports and articles that support their case while of course ignoring anything that they don't agree with. Grow up and get a life or go do something useful with your time like help a charity or something that is worth while.

This thread would have to be the most immature, kindergarten like, pointless argument I have ever seen on any forum.

"Cooling Grips Worldwide: England And Germany Have Seen No Warming In 25 Years, Now At 1980s Level!"

"Ice breakers getting trapped in near record high sea ice around Antarctica, Arctic sea ice seeing a whopping 50% gain last summer, record killer cold and snow gripping Canada and the USA, rare snowfalls in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The string of cold weather events just doesn’t end. And all this in a non-La Nina year."

Toxic pollution from burning dirty coal has always been the biggest environmental problem.

quote:

Europe’s appetite for cheaper electricity is reviving mines that produce the dirtiest type of coal, threatening to boost pollution and raze villages that have survived since medieval times.

Across the continent’s mining belt, from Germany to Poland and the Czech Republic, utilities such as Vattenfall AB, CEZ AS and PGE SA are expanding open-pit mines that produce lignite. The moist, brown form of the fossil fuel packs less energy and more carbon than more frequently burned hard coal.

One hundred and one years ago, Douglas Mawson led a ship of explorers south from Australia to Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica, where they spent two years mapping the icy continent. He barely made it back alive; several of his crew didn’t.

Last month, a group of Australian global warming activists, led by a professor named Chris Turney, set out to retrace Mawson’s voyage. Their goal, according to one journalist along for the ride, was to “examine how the eastern Antarctic, one of the most pristine, remote and untouched parts of the world’s surface, has fared after a hundred years of climate changes.”

So it was a PR mission, to prove how global warming had changed Antarctica. Turney said Mawson’s original trip “provides this incredibly good baseline — we’re going to repeat the measurements and see how much has changed over the last century.”

But to call Turney’s trip a scientific mission isn’t entirely accurate. It was packed with tourists, environmental reporters, an Australian Green Party senator, and even Turney’s wife and kids.

It was a party — literally. Christmas parties, drinking parties, secret Santa parties, even some salsa dancing. Adventure tourists paid $8,000 and up to come along. 54 passengers, plus the crew. Of course Australian taxpayers covered the majority of the $1.5 million adventure.

All was going so well, with Turney blogging up a storm and doing media interviews via satellite.

And then the ship got stuck in pack ice. In the middle of the Antarctic summer.

Seventy kilometres further out to sea than the coastline where Mawson had landed.

The PR expedition to chart the disappearance of Antarctic ice became stuck in Antarctic ice. They couldn’t move. And it kept getting worse.

Ice was forming around the ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, by the hour — locking it in deeper, freezing so fast that soon the ice went all the way to the horizon.

“At the time we were initially caught by the sea ice, the Shokalskiy was just two to four nautical miles from open water,” Turney wrote. “Now the sea ice distance has become even greater with the continued winds from the east, putting our nearest point of exit at some 16 nautical miles.”

They say the definition of a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

To Turney, this ice prison was just more proof that global warming was indeed happening.

“Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up,” he explained.

Turney seemed to believe his own bafflegab. He was so confident the Antarctic ice was gone that he didn’t even charter an icebreaker for the mission. The Akademik Shokalskiy was merely “ice-hardened.”

Even though measurements all year showed that Antarctic ice extended a whopping 29% further out than normal.

A hundred years ago, Mawson made it out alive, but not the two companions with whom he had ventured inland.

One fell in a crevasse, taking food and dogs with him. The other starved, froze, went mad, bit off his own finger and then died. Mawson walked the last 160 km to the shore alone, and was so emaciated and frostbitten his crew didn’t recognize him.

Turney may have been willing to brazen it out like that, but his ship’s Russian crew had enough. They put out a distress signal. Soon French, Chinese and Australian icebreakers steamed over to help.

Even they could not penetrate the thick ice, so a Chinese helicopter had to fly back and forth, lifting Turney and his celebrity tourists to the Australian ship. Those three icebreakers had been doing important work supporting real research scientists in Antarctica, but the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea requires any nearby vessel to immediately respond to an SOS. Turney — translation: Australian taxpayers — will likely be sent the multi-million dollar rescue bills.

Funny thing, though. Before Turney got stuck in the ice, media coverage highlighted his global warming mission. But after he got stuck, according to the Media Research Center, 40 out of 41 TV news reports somehow forgot to mention that inconvenient truth.

Every year, much of the world experiences a phenomenon known as “seasons.” For many Americans, this means higher temperatures in the summer and lower temperatures in the winter. What does this have to do with global climate change? Not a whole lot.

But just as one season leads to another, the transition from fall to winter brings out the worst in too many conservatives. Indeed, in seems every winter, like clockwork, far-right yahoos start arguing, “It’s cold in winter, therefore global warming can’t be real.” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), playing his usual role, insisted yesterday that freezing temperatures in much of the country is obviously proof that climate science itself is “laughable.”

Something in this debate is laughable, but I’m afraid it isn’t the science.

Inhofe is hardly alone. As Chris Mooney noted the other day, plenty of notable figures on the right – Rush Limbaugh, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), Donald Trump, Drudge, Erick Erickson, et al – pushed the same argument. Fox Business’ Stuart Varney went so far as to say, “[W]e’re looking at global cooling, forget this global warming.”

And so we are forced once more to remind conservatives that cold winter weather in our part of the planet does not disprove global warming. Mooney patiently explained:

1. Statements about climate trends must be based on, er, trends. Not individual events or occurrences. Weather is not climate, and anecdotes are not statistics.

2. Global warming is actually expected to increase “heavy precipitation in winter storms,” and for the Northern Hemisphere, there is evidence that these storms are already more frequent and intense, according to the draft U.S. National Climate Assessment.

3. Antarctica is a very cold place. But global warming is affecting it as predicted: Antarctica is losing ice overall, according to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, sea ice is a different matter than land-based or glacial ice. Antarctic sea ice is increasing, and moreover, the reason for this may be climate change! (For more, read here.)

Brad Plumer added that temperatures in the United States do not necessarily reflect temperatures on the entire planet. While many Americans had to bundle up in December 2013, preliminary data suggests last month “was tied for the 2nd-hottest December on record since 1979, the beginning of satellite measurements,” and global average temperatures for all of 2013 “are expected to be among the 10 highest since 1850.”

You will no doubt receive an all-caps email soon from your wacky uncle who watches Fox News all day, perhaps with a picture of icicles attached, intended to serve as proof that climate change is a hoax. Gently remind him that winter weather in one country in January isn’t evidence of much, and if he’s interested in relying on evidence as part of the debate, there’s voluminous scientific data for him to check out that goes beyond looking out a window.

Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe.

But still: you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint....The AAE is right: the warm-mongers are indeed ‘stuck in our own experiment’. Frozen to their doomsday narrative like Jeff Daniels with his tongue stuck to the ski lift in Dumb and Dumber, the Big Climate enforcers will still not brook anyone rocking their boat. In December 2008 Al Gore predicted the ‘entire North Polar ice cap will be gone in five years’. That would be December last year. Oh, sure, it’s still here, but he got the general trend-line correct, didn’t he? Arctic sea ice, December 2008: 12.5 million square kilometres; Arctic sea ice, December 2013: 12.5 million square kilometres.

Big Climate is slowly being crushed by a hard, icy reality: if you’re heading off to university this year, there has been no global warming since before you were in kindergarten. That’s to say, the story of the early 21st century is that the climate declined to follow the climate ‘models’. (Full disclosure: I’m currently being sued by Dr Michael Mann, creator of the most famously alarming graph, the ‘hockey stick’.) You would think that might occasion a little circumspection. But instead the cultists up the ante: having evolved from ‘global warming’ to the more flexible ‘climate change’, they’re now moving on to ‘climate collapse’. Total collapse. No climate at all. No sun, no ice. No warm fronts, except for the heaving bosoms in Rajendra Pachauri’s bodice-rippers. Nothing except the graphs and charts of ‘settled science’. In the Antarctic wastes of your mind, it’s easier just to ice yourself in.

Climate change has become a major political issue, but few understand how climate has changed in the past and the forces that drive climate. Most people don't know that fifty million years ago there were breadfruit trees and crocodiles on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, or that 18,000 years ago there was a mile-thick glacier on Manhattan and a continuous belt of winter sea ice extending south to Cape Hatteras. The History of Climate provides context of our current climate debate and fundamental insight how the climate works.

Dr. Daniel Britt is a Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences at the Department of Physics, University of Central Florida. He was educated at the University of Washington and Brown University, receiving a Ph.D. from Brown in 1991. He has had a varied career including service in the US Air Force as an ICBM missile launch officer and an economist for Boeing before going into planetary sciences. He has served on the science teams of two NASA missions, Mars Pathfinder and Deep Space 1. He was the project manager for the camera on Mars Pathfinder and has built hardware for all the NASA Mars landers.

Britt currently does research on the physical properties and mineralogy of asteroids, comets, the Moon, and Mars under several NASA grants. Honors include 5 NASA Achievement Awards, election as a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society, and an asteroid named after him; 4395 Dan Britt. He is currently President of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

A Drexel University study finds that a large slice of donations to organizations that deny global warming are funneled through third-party pass-through organizations that conceal the original funder

By Douglas Fischer and The Daily Climate

The largest, most-consistent money fueling the climate denial movement are a number of well-funded conservative foundations built with so-called "dark money," or concealed donations, according to an analysis released Friday afternoon.

The study, by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle, is the first academic effort to probe the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the climate denial movement.

It found that the amount of money flowing through third-party, pass-through foundations like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital, whose funding cannot be traced, has risen dramatically over the past five years.

In all, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations from 2003 to 2010.

Meanwhile the traceable cash flow from more traditional sources, such as Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, has disappeared.

The study was published Friday in the journal Climatic Change.

"The climate change countermovement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act on global warming," Brulle said in a statement. "Like a play on Broadway, the countermovement has stars in the spotlight – often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians – but behind the stars is an organizational structure of directors, script writers and producers."

"If you want to understand what's driving this movement, you have to look at what's going on behind the scenes."

Consistent fundersTo uncover that, Brulle developed a list of 118 influential climate denial organizations in the United States. He then coded data on philanthropic funding for each organization, combining information from the Foundation Center, a database of global philanthropy, with financial data submitted by organizations to the Internal Revenue Service.

According to Brulle, the largest and most consistent funders where a number of conservative foundations promoting "ultra-free-market ideas" in many realms, among them the Searle Freedom Trust, the John Williams Pope Foundation, the Howard Charitable Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

Another key finding: From 2003 to 2007, Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were "heavily involved" in funding climate change denial efforts. But Exxon hasn't made a publically traceable contribution since 2008, and Koch's efforts dramatically declined, Brulle said.

Coinciding with a decline in traceable funding, Brulle found a dramatic rise in the cash flowing to denial organizations from DonorsTrust, a donor-directed foundation whose funders cannot be traced. This one foundation, the assessment found, now accounts for 25 percent of all traceable foundation funding used by organizations promoting the systematic denial of climate change.

Jeffrey Zysik, chief financial officer for DonorsTrust, said in an email that neither DonorsTrust nor Donors Capital Fund "take positions with respect to any issue advocated by its grantees."

"As with all donor-advised fund programs, grant recommendations are received from account holders," he said. "DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund ensure that recommended grantees are IRS-approved public charities and also require that the grantee charities do not rely on significant amounts of revenue from government sources. DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund do not otherwise drive the selection of grantees, nor conduct in-depth analyses of projects or grantees unless an account holder specifically requests that service."

A Gallup Poll taken last week asked Americans what they consider to be the most important problem facing the U.S. The government came in at #1, and the economy at #2.

Notable by its absence from the 14-item list, which includes only those "most important" problems mentioned by at least 2% of respondents, is one putatively huge problem, the biggest problem on earth, supposedly, one that receives a constant drumbeat of coverage in the MSM.

Whoops:

quote:

The Kyoto treaty effectively expired a year ago. Prospects for a replacement are virtually zero. Rich nations are rejecting climate compensation for the developing world. Europe is in a coal frenzy. Germany, a former green trend-setter, is slashing unaffordable subsidies to the renewables industry. The European Parliament is losing confidence in the EU emissions trading scheme. No Asian nation has an emission trading scheme in operation. China's and India's net emissions are growing dramatically and governments, most recently Japan's, are abandoning earlier pledges to reduce their nations' carbon footprints. Even US Democrats, notwithstanding President Obama's direct action-style energy plan, won't pass modest carbon-pricing bills in the Congress. Add to this those debunked predictions (remember the vanishing Himalayan glaciers, disappearing North Polar ice cap?), and it is clear that Tim Flannery's moment has come and gone.

Meanwhile, 2013 marked the 15th year of flat-lined global surface temperatures, despite record levels of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere since 1998. And as the US shale "fracking" revolution shows, the most efficient way to cut emissions is not via command-and-control regulation but by allowing private drillers to expand natural gas production.

Of course, the environmental doomsayers remain apocalyptic. You try going on the ABC's Q&A and raise doubts about global-warming alarmism. You will still see the inner-city studio audience treating you not merely with hostility but with open-mouthed incredulity....Contrary to media stereotypes, many so-called sceptics - such as Abbott, John Howard, Maurice Newman and this writer - recognised that the rise in carbon dioxide as a result of the burning of fossil fuels led to moderate warming.

But because we questioned the doomsday scenarios and radical, costly government-directed plans to decarbonise the economy, we were denounced as "deniers".

Those days are over....

At last, there is recognition not just that there are at least two sides to every story, but that when sophisticates seek to shut down debate, it amounts to an attack on the public interest.

The changes that have occurred due to global warning are too small to account for. It has nothing to do with global warming, it has to do with where we live….Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. The opportunities for taxation, for policies, for control, for crony capitalism are just immense, you can see their eyes bulge,” he says.

“Even many of the people who are supportive of sounding the global warning alarm, back off from catastophism. It’s the politicians and the green movement that like to portray catastrophe.”